What is Family Enmeshment Trauma? - The Meeting Matters

Enmeshment is a boundaryless dynamic between parent and child where the child exists to serve the emotional, physical, and mental needs of the parent. There is no separation between ‘I’m a healthy little child’ and ‘there’s a hierarchy and a boundary, and you’re the parent’. The child serves to rotate around the parent. It almost feels as if the parent can’t breathe without the child in some way. 

First, there is a power imbalance. And I mean just by nature of its existence, a parent and child have a power imbalance. There should be a hierarchy where the child is under the parent and is safe, but that’s not what is happening. In enmeshment, the child is being pulled into the parent’s world in every situation. Maybe they are their parent’s best friend. One manifestation of this friendship is when parents excessively share their trauma about their childhood or their marriage or could be anything painful to them and the child is expected to emotionally help the parent get back on track. 

The parent sees the child as someone who would listen to the tragic life they endured and so the child is now handled the responsibility without even knowing, to bring comfort to the parent and the cycle which started from being empathic towards the parent turns into a burdening weight of responsibility on child’s shoulders. Even when the child tries to enjoy moments with friends or a partner, the guilt of leaving the parent behind lingers. Where is the guilt stemming from? Now the enmeshed relationship is also causing enmeshment or fusion of feelings where the child no longer has a sense of self or what they should be feeling.

You no longer know what you want in your life or what your desires are. It’s like the body is yours but inside is the parent you share an enmeshed bond with. In other words, a fusion of feelings is created where the child loses their sense of self. You are living the life but the lens of seeing the world is enmeshed with the lens of parent. A good example is the mother who has endured a painful life of abuse, shame, and neglect from partner and she sees her child as someone who is going to fulfill the unmet needs of her. This gives rise to toxic expectations that the child is now bound to fulfill. 

Next, so you keep playing right. In addition, the child is forced to take on the role of career, putting their own needs last to support the parent. From an early age, they are given this responsibility, and even though they are still young, they develop a trauma bond out of survival necessity. Extreme parent-child interactions, in which the parent is both the source of terror and protection, are particularly notable for the trauma bond. Evolutionary we need the love of parents for survival. So in the case of an enmeshed parent-child relationship to survive the child has to fulfill this responsibility. As a child, we’re in the trauma bond because we have no choice. 

The main thing is to understand that your parent’s overdependency on you makes you live in an ‘emotional prison’. You have no sense of self, no dreams of your own, their values are your values and finally the days when you get to enjoy a bit with yourself, the inner emotions will yell at you causing guilt. This overdependency is disguised as ‘love’ by parents but without even realizing the parent instead of processing their trauma, has given the responsibility to their child to do that for them. This causes the child to take the role of the parent and the parent becomes the child, hence enmeshed relationship.

The child who is given the role of healing the parent and being there for them all the time makes them loses their own identity but above all, they become hypervigilant manifested as ‘is my mom okay? , why is she sad? What made her cry? Who made her cry? I have to make her feel better or otherwise I will be depressed because if she is depressed then I am depressed (enmeshed emotions)’. So the child’s mind is always preoccupied with the thoughts of the parent if they are okay. The child is happy only when the parent is happy or when the parent is allowing them to be happy.

HOW THE ENMESHMENT AFFECTS YOU?

First, it affects your nervous system. Because your nervous system was so up and down and, in that fight, or flight stage, the thing you’re always seeking in every scenario is safety which means a calmer place, safety in relationships, or whatever it is. So, you often spend your life in lifelong emotional dysregulation. The core of that is you spend your life trying to seek safety, but oftentimes especially if you remain unaware and not healed, you’re often in the same situations time and time again with friends, bosses, coworkers, colleagues, and partners, for sure. But deep inside you are unsafe and that is what you’re trying to find. That’s the thing you didn’t get in your childhood. 

Second, it affects the relationship you have with yourself. It affects your sense of self. It is clear in enmeshment trauma that you did not have a safe place to allow yourself to develop a separate sense of self. Your dreams are their dreams, your emotions are their emotions. So, you often don’t know who you are at the core, and you might be successful or you might not. You might be struggling. You might not. But deep inside it’s like there’s a vacancy about who you are and what matters to you, what makes you ‘you’. The struggles there can become for instance: ‘I do have a sense of meaning and identity when I’m a people pleaser’ or ‘When I’m a compulsive caretaker’ or ‘I get meaning from being what you want me to be’. And so that becomes the template for the rest of the world and relationships. And that can play out in some difficult ways. Because if you don’t know who you are, then you can’t decide what your morals are, what your boundaries are, your belief systems and what you will accept, what you will not and that can play out in a lot of difficult and toxic ways for you.

And lastly, the lifelong issue is about trusting human beings. What I’m talking about is that at the core, if you never got to be safe in your emotional self and physical self or otherwise, then you don’t trust people deep down inside often.  So, you might do things in an attachment pattern to cling to them because you are afraid you’ll lose them since they’re giving you a sense of meaning. But you don’t ever really trust that they won’t ever leave you. Or you feel avoidant where you let people get only so close and then there’s a wall. And then there is something common in many of us.

Even though we may not live our lives in a disorganized way, we might be fairly put together and functional deep inside, there’s chaos and a lack of consistency and safety about what relationships look and feel like inside for us, and so that can manifest in both anxious and avoiding patterns. The good news is therapy always helps you heal and better late than never!